'White with fury and contempt'

'When I was about twelve years old,' Edith Sitwell recalls in Taken Care Of, 'my father determined that He (I must really use a capital letter in this connection) must be portrayed for posterity ...  After a good deal of fussing, he decided that Sargent was to be the artist whom he would take under his wing, and he set about teaching the gentleman in question his business.
  My father was portrayed in riding-dress (he never rode), my mother in a white-spangled low evening gown and a hat with feathers, arranging, with one prettily shaped, flaccid, entirely useless hand, red anemones in a silver bowl (she never arranged flowers, and in any case, it would have been a curious occupation for one wearing a ball-dress, even if, at the same time, she wore a hat). 
  The colour of the anemones was repeated in my scarlet dress. I was white with fury and contempt, and indignant that my father held me in what he thought was a tender paternal embrace. (I was freed from my Bastille* during the period of the sittings.) Osbert and Sacheverell, sitting on the floor, playing with my mother's black pug, were the only beings that seemed to have any trace of life. Mr Sargent, a kind and charming man, kept them more or less quiet by reciting to them the following verse, repeated at intervals: 
        There was a young lady of Spain
        Who always was sick on the train – 
        Not once and again,
        Or again and again –
        But again and again and again.
  The portrait was painted against the background of one of the great Renishaw** tapestries – depicting Justice, as it happened.'

* The 'Bastille' was a hideous torture device intended to correct Edith's slight stoop and weak ankles. Under the direction of a Mr Stout (who looked like 'a statuette constructed of margarine'), she was, she recalls, 'incarcerated in a sort of Bastille of steel. This imprisonment began under my arms, preventing me from resting them on my sides. My legs were also imprisoned down to my ankles, and at night-time these, and the soles of my feet, were locked up in an excruciating contraption. Even my nose did not escape this gentleman's efficiency, and a band of elastic surrounded my forehead, from which two pieces of steel (regulated by a lock and key system) descended on each side of the organ in question, with thick upholstered pads at the nostrils, turning my nose very firmly to the opposite way which Nature had intended, and blocking one nostril, so that breathing was difficult.'
 Edith's dreadful father made much of her crooked nose when setting up the portrait with Sargent, who, exasperated by Sir George's constant fussing, revenged himself by painting Edith's nose straight and giving a slight kink to her father's. 

** The Sitwell family seat in Derbyshire.